One of Elliott's experiments writing a full rock song, and I'll be damned if he didn't write quite a fine Led Zeppelin song (albeit with highly self destructive lyrics).
The construction of the song defies easy labels. I prefer to think of it not having real choruses. There are verses with distinct A and B sections, and these break into sections that are more like bridges. I love the neat little rhythmic hitch of the A-sections. The B-sections are flowing with beautiful high guitar leads, and of the chord changes travel into some cool territory. Both sections are too brief to really be their own movements.
The bridge portion demonstrates some typical multi-chord Elliott Smith ideas with winding, chromatic singing. It seems almost a little thrown together for him, but his thrown-together bridges are still theoretically air-tight.
The song's ending scales show his chops really putting something heavy together.
The strange fade out is very reminiscent of endings on the Beatles' Revolver album. In fact, for as Zeppelin-esque as the song feels, its little 3-minute runtime and plethora of ideas in that span really puts it in line with those Revolver tunes too.
The song is one of the last of my favorites of what Elliott Smith wrote. It appears on his fifth album, Figure 8, which I consider his weakest. The early momentum of his career appears to have been dissipating, with the rush of the Oscar nomination receding into the rearview, maybe the excitement of toying with full instrumentation on his previous album, XO, leaving him scratching his head what to do next. His disastrous drug use was also beginning to decimate his talent.
He only worked on one more album, From a Basement On the Hill, which was incomplete at the time he died. There are one or two inspiring blasts on that album too, but I think it would've been a challenging, unknowably long era to endure before maybe true reinvention would've taken hold. A guy like Elliott Smith, it seems, wasn't equipped for that kind of long haul. He seemed built to break.